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Now, our best hope for saving lives and restoring economic
activity is to bring the number of active cases back down sharply
through the temporary lockdowns across the nation while rapidly
building our public health containment system for the post-lock-
down phase.
If lockdowns are able to prevent further viral spread, and they
should be able to do so if properly enforced and managed-- which
is not yet the case in many parts of the country -- the number of
active cases will fall sharply, mostly through recoveries but also
through tragic deaths. But when the infection rate drops, and the
economy as well as our daily lives are enabled to gradually restart,
we will need to contain the infectious cases that will remain in cir-
culation, so as not to allow the pandemic to resurge.
The spread of the pandemic can be understood using a simple
numerical example. The numbers in this illustration are not preci-
se, as they will vary place to place and as there is still much that is
not known about the spread of the disease.
Let’s call today day one. Suppose an individual, we’ll call him
Jack, becomes infected through contact with a person who caught
the virus a few days earlier. Jack becomesinfectiousto others on day
four, but without symptoms appearing on that day. The symptoms,
such as coughing, difficulty breathing and fever, begin on day five
and Jack remains infectious and in the community through day
nine. At that point most individuals recover or at least become
much less infectious to others. The unlucky ones end up in hospital
and in the most severe cases, die. Such numbers will vary by case,
but are broadly in linewith thetimeline laid out in current studies.
During days four through nine, Jack circulates in the commu-
nity, especially if his symptoms are on the mild side, potentially
passing the infection to others. Let us say that he makes on ave-
rage16 daily contactswith others, some briefer, some longer. Most
of those contacts don›t infect the other person, but every once in a

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